Recovering life in the desert: successful experience with indigenous communities in Mendoza, Argentina

ABRAHAM ELENA M.; TORRES LAURA; SORIA, DARIO; RUBIO, MARÍA CLARA; RUBIO, CECILIA

Living Land

Gomer Press Ltd

Lugar: London; Año: 2015; p. 155 - 158

In contrast to the widespread image of Argentina as the ?the world?s breadbasket?, reality shows a vast territory (around 70 per cent) of dry, arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid lands affected by different degrees of desertification.The Monte Phytogeographic Province makes up an arid diagonal that crosses the country with all gradations of aridity. This ecoregion, devoted to raising cattle and livestock, is the driest of cattle lands in Argentina. Agricultureis confined to areas under intensive irrigation, the winemaking ?oases?. Both types of land use are responsible for a great part of the degradation, evidenced not only by biodiversity loss and deforestation of native woodland, but fundamentally by the poverty of the people, most of them subsistence goat herders who still remain in non-irrigated drylands in extremely critical survival conditions